Will having premarital sex increase your odds of divorce?
If you’re a woman who has been warned that sexual promiscuity will ruin your life, a new analysis from the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies (IFS), of all places, undermines that notion.
The research, conducted by University of Utah family studies professor Nicholas H. Wolfinger, found that the five-year divorce rate for women who had 10 or more sexual partners before getting married in the 2000s (33 percent) was not statistically significantly higher than the rate for women who had two premarital partners (30 percent).
But that’s not the message that Christian and right-wing news outlets took away from the study, which used data from the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG).
The Christian Post’s headline emphasized that women who are virgins before getting married had the lowest divorce rate. The full article admits that these women are “scarce” without noting just how scarce they are: Only 5 percent of current brides have never had sex before saying, “I do.”
Glenn Beck’s Blaze predictably highlighted the virgin finding, too. Falling in line, The Federalist advised: “To Divorce-Proof Yourself, Don’t Have Premarital Sex.”
Outside of the right-wing reports, reactions to Wolfinger’s analysis were more measured. ScienceDaily and a Salt Lake City CBS affiliate reassured readers that “more sex partners before marriage doesn’t necessarily lead to divorce.” And the Salt Lake Tribune illustrated the same point by observing that women who had nine premarital partners technically posted lower divorce rates than women who had two.
It’s no coincidence that outlets with a conservative bent would not-so-subtly encourage women to remain virgins before marriage instead of, say, reporting the key findings that are relevant to 95 percent of American women.
In her coverage, for example, Joy Pullman, managing editor of The Federalist, warned: “If you get used to shopping around before marriage, you’re developing a bad habit of loving and leaving that will make you more likely to divorce once married.”
Even leaving aside the fact that correlation is not causation, Wolfinger’s study simply doesn’t support Pullman’s warning. Unless you’re a virgin, the NSFG data is mostly irrelevant; whether you’ve had three premarital partners or you’ve had seven, five-year divorce rates tend to be about the same.
A more appropriate analogy, then, might be: If you have ever gone shopping before, you will know that it’s possible to find what you’re looking for in a different store.
Also telling is the fact that it’s always women, rather than men, who are placed under the magnifying glass when we examine the effects of premarital sex on marriage.
In fact, most studies on this subject based on NSFG data focus solely on women due to gendered inconsistencies in the NSFG survey itself. As Wolfinger himself explained in an alarmingly brief parenthetical, the NSFG “doesn’t have full data on men’s premarital sexual behavior, and in any event they recall their own marital histories less reliably than do women.”
In other words, bad survey design has spawned years of studies asking if women are ruining their marriages by doing exactly what men do, too. (The NSFG does tell us that the percentage of ever-married men who have had premarital sex is slightly higher than the percentage of women who have done so, and that both genders begin having premarital sex at around age 17.)
In the end, Wolfinger acknowledges that his analysis “raises more questions than it answers.” And although it seems clear from his numbers that abstinence before marriage correlates with lower five-year divorce rates, that finding does not tell us everything about the quality of those marriages.
Still married and sexually functional, as other studies demonstrate, are two different things. For instance, starting in 2008, University of Washington sociologist Sarah Diefendorf followed a group of Christian men who had made premarital abstinence pledges across several years of their marriages. She reported that “these men don’t know how to talk to their wives about [sex],” and that they still think about sex in rigid terms of control.
According to a press release for her work, one man told her: “For me to come home from work and say [to my wife], ‘Hey, did you like it last time?’ I mean that would be—that would be such a weird question for me to ask.”
Will having premarital sex increase your odds of divorce? A better question to start asking might be: How will abstaining from premarital sex affect your marriage?
